selfportrait 20/21

i am a simple man –
i want to buy soap that smells like soap not misty
     morning mountain sunset
i like beer that tastes like beer & coffee
     that tastes like coffee
          except from my birthday to thanksgiving when
          everything should taste like pumpkin
is it too much to ask that life be free from pain – 

now i walk with a cane;
hobble-bobble to the toilet at night
answer to an ancient riddle – whose fault is it
when i was a child i was taught it’s mine &
     eve&adam’s – swerve of shore to bend of bay –
          especially hers though & so she
     bringeth forth her babes in pain – lilith
          won’t you came again – deliver us
               from the sins of men /
  women in their laboring

& now earth too is dying
– floating between the astral & ethereal –
we bind ourselves in this crude matter
body becomes ache – mind just reflection 
     in the shallow deep – cthulhu rising to the surface –
here, here is the place – remove the countenance
     from your face – our forebears brought down 
          mammoths for commerce & love
                of profit & prestige –

here is where no mortal goes, beyond this gate, beyond
     this row of broken knickknacks gone before
          nature doesn’t do it any more 
     than the sun which supersizes sorrow – diminishes
          distance between saints & viruses
               visions & bloodcells 
                    multiplying fastly like
                    ligatures like æsc & and
& cézanne his skull upon the table

needles to my arm extract the cells & reinfuse
regrowing boneblood factory farm 

i no longer believe in
epiphany or perfection 
bone & blood & body only 
are to be trusted 
the secret stone growing 
in the gut & femur – elusive 

— & that woman i saw

—
one day after being 
pumped full of toxins
walking to the subway 
from the hospital
—

sitting in her piss & pus 
from her open ankle showing
clearly what we are made of –

in brooklyn

i turn the corner & it smells
like condom     walk a block
     it smells like carnation
    like my bisavó’s garden 
          & i’m 5 & my finger
              gets slammed in the car
              door & she puts some
              goop on it     some old world
              slop that probably cures
              malaria & remember chicken
    pox – your brother had it 
first
     oven mitts are good for guarding
but
    you need a swatter to bat a batwing
    flitting at your face & you fly like
tituba
    to islands ancestors
anticipated
    you would inherit
but 
     empires & earthworks
    enter our echelons 
uninvited
    empty their echoes at tea
    elevate their wigs
    ancient strains in flattened tones
minister to the sickened sole
treadwear down a witching path

enter three witching welcomes:
– at noon, the wedge between church & granite
– at coffee, the hand that rocks the porchlit porcelain
– at mass, the equivalent to an energetic transfer
    of elementals

[plutonium]   yeast   ectoplasm

Ed Go is a Chinese-Filipino-Portuguese-English-Scottish-Irish American writer raised in Massachusetts, Virginia, Alaska, Hawaii and Connecticut. A former video store clerk, school bus driver, CDL driving instructor, garbage truck driver, exterminator, phone book deliverer, mystery shopper, and lead singer/guitar-player in a punk-folk band, Ed Go currently lives, writes and works in Brooklyn, NY. His writings have been published in various online and print journals and anthologies, and his chapbook Deleted Scenes from the Autobiography of Ed Go as told by Napoleon Id was published in 2014 by Other Rooms Press, and “new machines,” a sequence of twenty-one prose poems in the anthology Urgent Bards in 2016 by Urbantgarde Press.